Duolingo, this is what you are missing — a UX analysis
Designing a language learning app based on user’s intrinsic motivations.
Learning Portuguese by December 2019. That was one of the requirements that I needed to meet in order to get my European nationality.
With no time for attending a language school and after some friends’ recommendations, I decided to experience the Duolingo way and I downloaded the app.
Beautiful app.
Fun, interactive, easy to use, and with an extremely engaging visual interface.
The onboarding process took less than a minute; I created my account, selected the language I wanted to learn and I was ready to go.
The whole setup was curiously simple.
The app never asked me the reason WHY I wanted to learn Portuguese.
They did ask what level of portuguese I wanted to acquire, but never did they approach the reason behind my interest.
Right there a hypothesis started to develop.
💬Questions started bubbling in my head:
• How am I going to be able to meet my personal goal if there is no roadmap to get there?
• How many people have actually finished a Duolingo course?
• What does the Duolingo completion rate actually look like?
After looking for answers on Google for 30 minutes, the results were:
NONE 👀
I couldn’t find anywhere on the internet, a formal Duolingo language completion rate, and they couldn’t either.
This was the most comprehensive statistics document I found, and it didn’t include a course completion rate.
So I decided to do my own research and put together an online survey (you can find it here).
By The Numbers
I end up getting around 30 survey responses 📈
About 20% of people that have acquired a new language actually have used a mobile app as their learning channel.
While 75% of them chose to use Duolingo to learn another language, NONE of them have actually completed the courses.
When I asked WHY, the two main reasons were:
1) “I felt the program was too long” ⏳
2) “I just got bored and quit early.” 😬
I kept asking myself:
- Why did they feel the program was too long?
- Why did they get bored?
- Weren’t they motivated enough?
Looking to answer all my whys, I set up a couple of interviews with some bilingual friends.
Here’s what duolingo users said.
I interviewed five people.
👩🏻👱🏼♂️👩🏽🦱👱🏻♀️👨🏾🦰
All of them have used Duoling at least once, AND, as a confirmation of my quantitative data, none of them have completed the course.
My goal for this experiment was to learn the reason why they decided to START using duolingo and why they STOPPED using it.
The one thing they have in common was that none of them could remember the reason why they started using duolingo.
100% of them agreed on really liking the simplicity and gaming approach of Duolingo.
“It was easy to navigate, and I get points every time I reach a level”. 🏆
Would you use it again? I asked.
“Yes, probably, but I’m not sure if I would finish it”. 🤷🏽♀️
They also demonstrated dissatisfaction with the randomness of the lessons. They often refer to the lessons as too repetitive and too basic.
“Learning how to say table leg wouldn’t actually help me interact with locals on my trip”.
I kept asking questions.
👩🏽🎓What motivates a person to learn?
🏁How do people commit to reaching their goals?
🧐Can you really learn a second language with an app?
All these questions were circling in my head so I started deeper research into just how effective duolingo-like language learning apps really are.
About user motivation
I found that there are basically two types of user motivation
Extrinsic and intrinsic.
(EX)trinsic motivation (think about outer sources) involves doing something because you want to earn a reward or avoid punishment, while (IN)trinsic motivation (think about inner stimulus) involves doing something because it’s personally rewarding to you.
In the vast majority of cases, extrinsic motivation seeks reward, 🥇which can be tangible (money, prizes, diplomas, certificates, trophies, medals, etc.) and intangible (praise, support, recognition, etc.)
On the other hand, intrinsic motivation is the inner engine moving a person to self-improvement 💪🏽. It involves engaging in a behavior because it is personally rewarding.
While intrinsic motivation is often seen as the ideal, both extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation are important ways of driving behavior.
Eureka!
Duolingo’s gamification approach to boost motivation is a check ✅ for extrinsic motivation, but a fail ❌ for intrinsic motivation, which clearly represented an opportunity for improvement, and possible boost on user engagement/completion rate.
Designing for motivation
By reading this interesting post about motivation and design, I got inspired on several ways to approach users’ intrinsic motivations in a language learning app.
I came up with different ideas to integrate intrinsic motivation into the gamification approach in order to generate positive impact on goal completion.
The three main objectives were:
- Add a goal setting feature
- Provide lessons based on user interests
- Adjust lesson scope based on user goal time frame
Introducing a Mid-Fi approach to a goal based language learning app 📲
🎮 You’ll find the prototype here, if you want to play with it.
Main screens
These four screens will allow the user to ask themselves:
- why are they learning a new language, and
- help them set and track their goals properly.
Takeaway
Including user intrinsic motivations into your designs really makes you think about the why behind people’s needs.
It facilitates your design thinking process to be more empathetic, and leads you on the path to build products that people will actually use, and most importantly, engage with.
